Beet Wagon posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFScbd4BtTI

Inspector Gesicht posted:

I stopped playing Warframe when I hit a bottleneck where I had to create a "lithos relic" or something to proceed. The game technically tells you how to do it but I didn't feel like using my brain for five seconds. Is this a common roadblock in the game?

Colostomy Bag posted:

I'm homeless because of this game you insensitive clod.

Sectopod posted:

This needs to go into the OP.

e: bovine taxxe

MedicineHut posted:

Jump points done right! https://kapwi.ng/c/GXaYmwBo

Beet Wagon posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFScbd4BtTI

Mirificus posted:

Beet Wagon posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFScbd4BtTI

Mirificus posted:

Dementropy posted:

Inspector Gesicht posted:

I stopped playing Warframe when I hit a bottleneck where I had to create a "lithos relic" or something to proceed. The game technically tells you how to do it but I didn't feel like using my brain for five seconds. Is this a common roadblock in the game?

Mirificus posted:

rePool posted:

* We have always been clear about our game being in alpha.

These developers are severely obtuse or are missing the point as to where all the complaints are coming from. Alpha isn't carte blanche for perpetual crowdfunding and development.

Mirificus posted:

Beet Wagon posted:

Obviously if they don't say it is a scam it isn't a scam. Duh. What are you. Some kind of idiot?

Beet Wagon posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFScbd4BtTI

Bofast posted:

I had forgotten how dreadful the vocal parts were in Full Burn. Very fitting for Star Citizen, though

Bofast posted:

I had forgotten how dreadful the vocal parts were in Full Burn. Very fitting for Star Citizen, though

jaegerx posted:

Remember that huge plot twist when sandi read her resignation letter but then didn’t resign. That’s peak drama.

Quavers posted:

Fidelity!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waViZBJL6Xw

precision posted:

Jesus christ

Lmao

Quavers posted:

Fidelity!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waViZBJL6Xw

Sarsapariller posted:

Mission Report: 11/25/2019

My self-imposed mission: Find something, anything, approaching fun in the game.

Report Begins

I wake up in a new wank pod. More of a wank locker room, really. It would appear that players have been relocated to Area 18 on Arccorp for the duration of the convention. This is somewhat of an improvement over last year, when players were forced to spawn at Port Olisar and then navigate their way on a 40-minute flight across the entire system to Hurston just to get to the convention, with no prompting. However, Area 18 is clearly not happy to see me. No, not at all. The game appears to be angry. It is stuttering and glitching and lagging in ways that I haven't seen in years- it feels like I've gone back in time to 2015 when the servers could barely hold up under the weight of twenty people flying around Port O. My rig has not fundamentally changed since the last time I logged into this shitheap four or five months ago, so it seems likely that this is not a me problem, it is a Chris problem. As all problems in Star Citizen must, inevitably, be. I press the Y button to get out of bed, a clear and obvious keybind that I do not have to spend several minutes hunting for. I go to hunt for a Wonkavator down to the convention.

But it is not to be. Obviously the bounty that lies within the convention center must be protected from mere gawkers. I'm going to have to loving earn it. The first Wonkavator finally arrives and of course it will only take me down to the lobby. There is another commando in the elevator with me. He is twitching and jittering like a meth addict passed through a stop-motion horror movie filter. I try to ignore him and step inside. The elevator lurches into life and comes to a stop- I step out. It is the wrong floor, just another endless line of wank lockers. Before I can step in again, the doors close, stranding me. I reflect that it is actually really hard to navigate in this world because every interior space looks exactly the loving same, but my meditations are interrupted by another Wonkavator arriving. I manage to ride this one down to the ground floor.

Area 18 is looking rough. It has the art assets of an entire city now, but crammed into the space of a single CryEngine map. Every surface is just dripping with pointless art and cyberpunk clutter. Wires and hotdog stands and gun merchants and steam from vents and cars overhead and NPC's milling about everywhere. All of this is probably supposed to give the scene some semblance of life, but it is all so generic and poorly integrated that it mostly just looks like somebody's Unity asset store got sick and threw up all over a public shopping center. My frames plummet into the single digits and I try to navigate to the convention by following the bright pink, glowing ads. This is not as easy as it sounds. There are ads on every loving surface, I mean that, seriously. They plaster the walls and the ceilings and the sky and the floors- ads for fictional sodas and clothing lines and spaceships and brands, brands, brands. They flicker and spark and they animate and some of them are 3D and holographic and they clutter every surface so badly that the eye goes nuts trying to find something, anything, to latch onto. The bright pink convention ads aren't even the only bright pink ads in the area- it is really difficult to tell poo poo apart, visually. I reflect that if you were to show me a vision of my own personal hell, it would probably look a lot like the glorious future that Chris Roberts has imagined for us.

As I walk towards the train I am repeatedly spammed by requests for deep space assistance. These non-sequitur mission requests take up about 20% of the screen, flashing on and then timing out, flashing on and then timing out. They are constant. This was a bug introduced in the spring of this year- the NPC's constantly spam these global missions for help when they are under attack. You could not possibly get to them in time to help, and they pay next to nothing anyway, so it's literally just a visual bug that punctuates the hellscape that the game has become. Obviously, I note, it has not been fixed. I also note as I walk that the NPC's have not received any upgrades. They still spin in place, wander aimlessly through the furniture, and clip into one another. It seems like the sort of thing that a person intent on making an actual video game might prioritize instead of, say, more neon-glowing brand art. But I know nothing about games development.

The train shudders and jerks into position and I begin my ride to the expo. This is another Chris-guided static tour through the cityscape, swooping around buildings and zooming toward the big convention center. Again, I can't help but be struck by the ubiquity of the ads plastering every surface, but here it is kind of a mercy. Without them, the buildings would look identical- tall and red and grey, differing only in height and angle. The entire city is like a rough sketch, which would be fine if the game didn't insist on the player doing nothing but staring at it out of moving windows for long segments of the gameplay.

Finally I arrive. The convention center, at last! The bus stop I arrive at is perfectly identical to the one I departed from. Did I take too long and go round trip? I have a moment of confusion. But no, this is actually a new place, except they made it by just copy-pasting the assets from the last place. Everything in Star Citizen looks the god drat same. Every station, every planet, every hallway. It's all grey corroded metal and glowing ads and military numbers on doors. It becomes extremely disorienting.

Stepping into the hall, I am greeted by the first actual portion of the convention and what I see shouldn't surprise me, shouldn't shock me in the least, but somehow it does. It's merch. Digital merch. The front room of the convention is an in-game t-shirt and hat store because of course it is. There are t-shirts for every brand of ship manufacturer, as well as special t-shirts for the ship expo itself (they are pink). The booths are shockingly unmanned, and it is unclear if the NPC's here are simply very trusting with their merchandise in the presence of strangers or if they all wandered off to a bathroom and clipped through a floor, never to be seen again. In any case, their many, many shirts are free for the taking.

I should note here of course that wearing anything other than a space suit and helmet in the game will get you killed instantly by invisible pockets of vacuum, and that anything you buy here will be reset by the next patch, presumably released in the next couple of weeks. So it's really all just extra-double super spectacularly pointless with a side of loving fudge, but that's Star Citizen.

I struggle with another Wonkavator but finally, after this 20-plus minute journey, I disembark and find myself at the convention center. Lo and behold, it is the exact same featureless grey room as last year's convention on Hurston. It is RSI day, named for the Chairman Himself, and much like its namesake it is very clear that Roberts Space Industries hasn't done gently caress-all in the last year. It is exactly the same layout with the same ships and vehicles- not one element has changed, except the new "Mantis" ship. Except they built the convention displays last year when it didn't exist, so rather than move everything they've just kind of awkwardly plonked it in the center of the pile of ships. NPC's move around the same paths from the year before- many of their paths taken them directly through the nacelles of this new ship. That's fine, this is fine. I see my second other actual human being of the day, and realize that the server lag is even worse than I thought. He skitters around the convention center like the world's biggest cockroach, often moonwalking at 50 mph as he rockets from one place to another, head constantly inclined upwards at the slumbering polygonal behemoths around us. Just think, I say to him, one day you might own one of these! One day some of them might even be flight worthy! But actually I don't say anything to him because chat is broken and won't come up on my visor. I kill myself to leave the convention center.

Verdict: I'm a year older and probably not much wiser from the last time I did these convention reports, but things feel different this time. The game feels tired. The assets are being copy-pasted in ways that are obvious. The constant, constant shilling and hocking of wares in-game feels perfunctory, tired even. The new tram-ride to the convention center was as by-the-numbers as it gets. The wank pods were sterile and generic. I did not feel the Chairman's special obsessive touch on any aspect of the game that I played today. Which isn't to say that things are looking up for Star Citizen. It is as ragged and broken as I've ever seen it. There is no fun to be found, and barely any gameplay. One wonders why a new player would even buy spaceships at this point- there's nothing in the 40+ minute experience I just went through that even gestures at this being a space game. Indeed, it seems to be a laggy-pedestrian-shopping-simulator. The actual spaceport, and the wider adventures of the game beyond, are hidden behind an entirely different and unlabeled series of elevators and trains and consoles.

The game doesn't just have tech debt, though it does have that in spades. It has design debt. So many half-systems, so many assumptions about what the player knows already or needs to be told- they pile up around me as I play, in great heaps and drifts like accumulating ash from some monstrous design Vesuvius, already erupting and soon to sweep over and consume this entire landscape. No game could survive this. Even if this village weren't on fire, it would be choked beneath the thick clouds of Chris's rank incompetence. I fear that we will never truly know the extent of the disaster that's taken place inside Cloud Imperium until decades from now, when crack teams of archaeologists chisel the bones out of the hardened remains of this ultimate disaster. Look for me there- I'll be the guy who went out jerkin' it.

Quavers posted:

Fidelity!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waViZBJL6Xw

Kikas posted:

1) Why are his hands so loving big

2) I still can't get over the fact that they 100% Archered the loving Cylon ship from Battlestar Galactica, I mean LOOK AT THIS THING:

They literally have one of those in 0:45, only it's looking like a bad 3D print of the wireframe model. I must have pointed that out before, how is noone but me seeing this?

hot ham water posted:

It's Citcon 2021 and Star Citizen is released and good. The PC gaming community is in awe as Chris Bear Roberts continues to singlehandledly make games good again. Sandi poses with her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.